Emmeline Pankhurst

Emmeline married Richard Pankhurst in 1878 and they had five - Christabel, Estelle Sylvia, Francis Henry, Adela and finally Henry Francis - named after his deceased brother. Richard died in 1898 leaving her in great debt.

Her daughters were active with the WSPU, but differences between her and her daughter Sylvia became apparent with the latter cultivating ties with socialists and becoming an unwed mother for which she was never forgiven.

She died on 14 June 1928 due to illness, at the age of 69.

Emmeline was born on 15 July 1858, in Manchester, England, to Robert Goulden, a successful businessman and Sophia Jane Craine, who were politically active folks. She was one of eleven siblings and the eldest amongst her sisters.

An avid reader, she read the Odyssey, The Pilgrim's Progress, Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History, and Stowe’ Uncle Tom's Cabin, and at 15, was admitted to the École Normale de Neuilly in Paris.

Her parents did not give importance to their daughters’ education, expecting them to marry young. Her mother received the Women's Suffrage Journal, and Pankhurst was full of admiration for its editor, Lydia Becker.

She met and began a courtship with Richard Pankhurst, a 44 year old barrister who had supported women's suffrage, freedom of speech and education reform and they wed in 1879.

At her Russell Square home, she hosted a variety of guests including US abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Indian MP Dadabhai Naoroji, socialist activists Herbert Burrows and Annie Besant, and French anarchist Louise Michel.

In 1888, when Britain's first nationwide coalition of groups advocating women's right to vote, the National Society for Women's Suffrage (NSWS), split, Pankhurst aligned herself with the group called" Parliament Street Society (PSS).

The PSS was reluctant to advocate on behalf of married women. Pankhurst and her husband helped organize the Women's Franchise League (WFL) dedicated to voting rights for all women – married and unmarried in1889.

The WFL was considered a radical organization, since apart from women's suffrage; it supported equal rights for women in the areas of divorce and inheritance, advocated trade unionism and sought alliances with socialist organizations.

Breaking away from the ILP, in 1903, she and several colleagues founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), open only to women and focused on direct action to win the vote.

The efforts of the WSPU bore fruit when The 1918 Representation of the People Act granted the vote to women over the age of 30 and the WSPU reinvented to become the Women's Party.